joined the ghostly figures which he had seen from a distance.

He went from one to another and, failing to see his father, was
thinking of returning to the parade, when a small incident occurred to
make him change his mind. The full moon appeared in the sky. She was
covered again immediately, then reappeared; and several times over,
between the ragged clouds, her magnificent radiance flooded the sky.
At this juncture, Simon, who had veered towards the right of the
beach, discovered that the fallen cliffs had buried the shore under
the most stupendous chaos imaginable. The white masses were piled one
atop the other like so many mountains of chalk. And it looked to
Simon as if one of these masses, carried by its own weight, had rolled
right into the sea, whence it now rose some three hundred yards away.

On reflection, he could not believe this possible, the distance being
far too great; but then what was that enormous shape outstretched
yonder like a crouching animal? A hundred times, in his childhood, he
had paddled his canoe or come fishing in this part; and he knew for
certain that nothing rose above the waters here.

What was it? A sand-bank? But its outlines seemed too uneven and its
grey colour was that of the rocks, naked rocks, without any covering
of wrack or other sea-weed.

He went forward, actuated in part by an eager curiosity, but still
more by some mysterious and all-powerful force, the spirit of
adventure. The adventure appealed to him: he must go up to this new
ground whose origin he could not help attributing to the recent
earthquake.

And he went up to it. Beyond the first belt of sand, beyond the belt
of small rocks where he stood, was the final bed of sand over which
the waves rolled eternally. But from place to place there rose still
more rocks, so that he was able, by a persistent effort, to reach what
appeared to be a sort of promontory.

The ground underfoot was hard, consisting of sedimentary deposits, as
Old Sandstone would have said. And Simon realized that, as a result of
the violent shocks and of some physical phenomenon whose action he did
not understand, the bed of the sea had been forced upwards until it
overtopped the waves by a height which varied in different places, but
which certainly exceeded the level of the highest spring tides.

The promontory was of no great width, for by the intermittent light of
the moon Simon could see the foam of the breakers leaping on either
side o